


The Abyss Also Gazes

by Sjukdom



Series: Distortion [1]
Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-01
Updated: 2017-03-01
Packaged: 2018-09-27 17:47:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10036940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sjukdom/pseuds/Sjukdom
Summary: Oswald was right when he said that it would change Edward.





	

**Author's Note:**

> The title is the part of one of Nietzsche's famous quotes: "And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you."

The water opened before him, taking in his body and closed over his face, the welcoming embrace that quickly turned into the last goodbye. The soft plashing was replaced by the low hum that silenced every sound coming from above the surface of the water. He didn't inhale enough air before diving in and now felt his chest tightening as his lungs, it seemed, were growing bigger and bigger with each second, demanding more and more space behind his ribs. Would they explode eventually if he wouldn't take a breath? His heart was racing and its beating had already been louder than the humming in his ears. His lungs hurt badly and he imagined them as two pink pieces of meat squeezed by the hard rib cage. Would they explode sooner or later, crushing his bones and his anxiously beating heart?

Scientifically, this seemed unlikely to happen.

His throat was sore, contracting painfully with the need to inhale. The water above veiled his vision, a great colorless mass, ever moving and ever still at the same time. It surrounded his whole body, probing the way into it, awaiting the final desperate breath. He imagined it rushing down his throat, flowing into his nostrils, filling his lungs instead of the air he needed so badly. The water was as tasteless as the air, yet it would kill him instead. A fraud in liquid form. He let out into the water a weird bubbling sound and before drawing the last fatal breath he rose above the water and coughed and coughed and coughed, choking at each inhale.

As he stopped coughing, Edward leaned back to the edge of the bathtub, breathing deeper and calmer this time. The light was too bright for his eyes. The noises were too loud for his ears. He felt like a dead man, brought back to life suddenly during his funeral. He had already forgotten what the life was feeling like in his dreamless slumber with no feelings at all. He longed for going back into his coffin - the bathtub, and the water was a shroud.

Except he wasn't dead at all and there was no funeral for him. There had been no funeral at all.

_the whole pier was the coffin and the whole river was the shroud_

But no funeral at all. No gravestone either, no place to visit except the bottom of the river. Underwater.

This time Edward inhaled properly, involuntarily blowing out his cheeks in a funny manner and dove again, facedown this time. There was, of course, a huge difference between being in the bathtub and being in the river. The river waters were cold and dark. He could make the water colder next time. Turn off the lights. There still would a huge difference between it and the black abyss he pushed Oswald into.

Ed touched the bottom of the bathtub with his face. There was the small plughole the water went into when the bath was over, for now plugged safely. A tiny peephole into another unknown abyss. Were the abysses connected in some way or another?

Or was it the same one all along?

The air came out of his nostrils in two threads of bubbles, floating up around his head. Ed reached out and unplugged the bathtub, letting the water rush down into the pipe. The abyss sucked it up greedily with satisfied gurgling sounds. Edward peered into the small water tornado, whirling wildly and disappearing in the plughole.

Is it the very same abyss?

He thought he could see an eye peering back at him from the hole, from the abyss, the eye that once was blue but the water turned it pale and grey.

That, of course, was nothing but the trick of his mind. 

_brilliant_

With a great effort Ed shifted his gaze and got up awkwardly, blinking the water out of his eyes.

***

Grey clouds were gathering above, big and full, scraping their fat bellies over high trees. The rain started slowly - separate single drops fell here and there, each making a soft noise. Thud. Thud. Thud. The ground was stained with dark wet dots. The big empty house amplified each “thud” in a disturbing way.

Ed couldn't help just standing and listening to it, blinking with each new sound, the goal of his visit to former Oswald's house completely forgotten.

Quickly this drizzle turned into a downpour and its noise swallowed every other sound. As if the rain was trying to hide that someone was circling around the house, unseen, unheard, watching with eyes that should be able to watch anything at all no more. He was coming closer and closer, pacing back and forth, touching the walls, his fingerprints invisible on the wet paint, probing the safety of the closed doors, knocking at the windows. Edward listened, hypnotized by the ordinary noises the ordinary rain was making that suddenly acquired a new meaning. The water became a veil that was hiding a human shape. Or not human at all anymore?

_he thrives in deep waters_

Ed forced himself to wake up and pinched the bridge of his nose to get hold of himself.

It was all because of this damn house, so dark and lonely. He had never liked it, he hated it since he first arrived here. It was too big for the small number of people that lived there, too old-fashioned, too dusty and too cold. Oswald looked so happy when he was chatting with Edward about this house and when Ed finally saw it for himself for the first time he was surprised in the most unpleasant way. It was so grotesquely, unnecessarily, stupidly obscure that it just looked like a very bad joke after everything he had heard from Oswald about it. It was a tasteless parody of a classic haunted house. Only that there certainly was something gaunt about it. The real deaths, for example. Not the ghosts that were haunting the house as Oswald once told him to his own disadvantage, of course. Ed couldn't quite get a grip of what it was for real.

Partly of his inability to solve the puzzle of this house Ed hated it. Everything about it. The windows that turned the brightest daylight into the dull grey mist. The walls that radiated wet coldness. The air inside the house that was stale and dry and the air coming from the outside that smelt of freshly dug soil. His own bed, so low he felt he was descending somewhere deep down each time he went to sleep. The sounds the old house was making. There was nothing supernaturally scary about them, but the way they were echoing inside this vast empty space and then died out, drowning in silence made them quite disturbing. It was the same kind of noisy silence Ed had to live with in the asylum at nights, with all these moans, mumbling and whispering the other inmates were making. He was slowly fading away with nothing to do at all there. He associated this silence with the dumb, gnawing kind of boredom. And that was what he hated about this house the most.

“Memories”, the right word he had been searching for suddenly flashed through his mind. That was the thing that made this house unlivable and terrifying. It had a weird aura that brought back the worst memories of its inhabitants. The more puzzling was Oswald's intention to stay in this house, where the life of his beloved father had come to the cruel end. The old man himself, perhaps, would be glad to move out of here, although Ed had never had a chance to ask his opinion. At least his remains were now somewhere else.

He hoped the thought would help him to focus and concentrate, but it did little good.

The rain was getting weaker now, the unsteady rhythm of the single drops falling on the windowsills was coming back. Knock knock knock, and the one lurking around was still there, knocking on windows, scratching the window frames, urging to be let in. Not only into the house as a rightful owner. Into Ed’s head. 

It was tree branches scratching the frames, of course.

And he had already been there.

Knock knock knock, from the deep waters of his mind as a delicate reminder.

Ed took a deep breath of the dry and dusty air, concentrated. The water ran down the windows, making the world outside seem grey and ethereal, as if he was looking up from the bottom of the river.

He didn't want to go very far into the house but so demanded the goal of his visit. He walked through the rooms in a quick pace without glancing around. Finally he reached it - the painting, a rectangle-shaped dark spot, the details of it swept away by the gloom. Which was nice. Ed didn't want to see any.

Quickly he reached for the spray and drew a green question mark upon the canvas, trying to hold his hand steadily. He would be happy to paint it all green, to cover everything, erase the faces completely, but it didn't go along with his plan. Ed stepped back as he finished, squeezing his eyes tightly, but anyway involuntarily catching a glimpse of Oswald's painted face with one eye hidden behind the curve of the green line. The other one continued to stare at him, unblinkingly and lifelessly. The gloom mixed the dark colors of the painting in one black void surrounding that stare.

Suddenly Ed jerked up his head, afraid that he could have been standing before the painting longer that he should. He didn't pay much attention to the track of the time and when he glanced around, he was ready to see the light of another day, another month, another year. The police could have come searching for him. 

Ed had a feeling that he could stand under that stare for a very long time as if turned to stone. For a day. A decade. A lifetime. Time could run as quickly as water ran through fingers. 

He pinched the bridge of his nose again, rather painfully this time and turned away, focusing on the rain that had finally stopped. Its dripping sounds were gone.

The one that was lurking and watching was not.

***

The water was gurgling in pipes. The smells of the river were leaking into the room, gentle and oozy. The air was wet and it felt like the whole room was entangled in a giant cobweb, soaked with the rain.

The abyss that were gazing at him was now everywhere. And nowhere. It wasn't on the outside, it was dwelling in his mind, affecting and transforming everything he saw. It was gazing with his own eyes.

He was.

Oswald was right when he said that it would change Edward. He didn't push Oswald into the river to drown and be gone forever, for he was still there. Oswald didn't left a trace of him in Edward's mind after he went underwater with a wound in his chest - more like he took Edward with him. The abyss swallowed both of them. 

For that he could kill Oswald twice. He could beg for forgiveness. He could slap him again, again and again until the grey slimy skin, sticky, corroded by the water, gave away, tearing under his palm. Ed sobbed, making a sound that barely resembled a giggle and fell onto his side, on the sheets that were soaked with his sweat. 

_the flesh underwater becomes soft and squishy_

_the skin grows pale and transparent_

_the eyes turn white, nothing than whites, no eyelids, no pupils, no irises_

_if they don't find the body quickly, creatures from the bottom of the river will eat everything to their likeness, everything vulnerable, soft and squishy and slimy_

He could tell Oswald that he managed to drive him insane just as effectively as he had driven Oswald. He could ask Oswald to let him go. 

_**Deep waters, only you can thrive there! The life on this Earth came out of the water, a thousand things with twice as many limbs, new and improved to live on the ground. The waters that took you in once as the servant let out the king! You came out as the king and went there as the beggar, you drowned as the friend and came back as an enemy...** ___

__Deep waters, ever transforming, ever changing._ _

__Changing you._ _

__At the bottom of the abyss he was looking above and seeing Oswald before him - an image as fragile and trembling as ripples on water. River sludge was wrapped in his hair, snails crawled upon his cheeks, leaving dark oily trails beneath his eyes, greenish dirty water ran down his body, pale and cold, not able to get warm anymore. It flowed upon the wound on his chest, washing it grey and bleak, gushing from the hole the bullet left. The blood, the heat of which Ed was still feeling on his hands from time to time, had long dissolved in the water._ _

__Ed tried to say something to him, but the only sounds he managed to make were nothing but choking and bubbling. The hum ran down his ears, his vision narrowed to one small dot of white light that disappeared in blackness. He reached out to Oswald, hoping to grab his hand, to hold on it and get out, but there was no one. His hand clutched the empty air and fell limply on the bed. Ed raised it to pinch the bridge of his nose, but his own skin was so cold and sweaty he couldn't force himself to touch it._ _

__His temples ached badly, the pressure of the pain was so intense his teeth hurt. As if he had inhaled too much air before diving in and now it was threatening to destroy him. The silence stood still, unbreakable, unbearable. Ed longed to hear something, someone, anyone to prove he wasn't alone here, but he certainly wasn't, was he? Oswald was close, always close, so close he could smell the scent on his skin and hair and feel his heart beating fast and anxiously as he hugged him. So close he remembered how his body looked under the fancy clothes. So close he couldn’t help thinking of what it would be like to push forward, beyond the limits of simple hugging, why had he never done that? So close he knew how the silky bathrobe caressed his skin when he put it on._ _

__So close he could hear his limping footsteps behind his door. Ed raised his head, staring blindly at the door through the twilight of his new room (was it evening or night already?), ready to face another trick of his_ _

___brilliant, brilliant, brilliant_ _ _

__mind. He stared and the one behind the door stared back, the dark shape shutting in the light behind the peephole. His own sweat stung his eyes and he blinked, the salty liquid was flowing into his eyes or so was the water leaking everywhere, from the cracks in the ceiling, from under the bed, was it flowing from the peephole too? The pressure in his head made everything sound painfully louder - the knocking at the door, the impatient screech of the doorknob turning._ _

__He could ask him for the act of mercy._ _

__Edward stood up and went to the door, swaying from side to side. Slowly and carefully as if he was moving underwater._ _


End file.
